welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

When SHIVER AND SHAKE merged into WHOOPEE! in
October 1974, Scream Inn and Frankie Stein were among the strips
that confidently made it to the combined paper. A few weeks after the merger Frankie
Stein stopped by at the spooky inn and tried to win the million quid.
Brian Walker was a very good imitator and his Frankie looked very much
like that by Robert Nixon. It’s a shame the printing presses used by IPC
at the time often failed to present beautiful artwork decently. The episode
is from WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 23 November, 1974 (No. 38).
Followed by both pages of the Frankie Stein strip from that same issue, by
Robert Nixon, of course.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Shiver and Shake
merged into Whoopee! in October 1974
and Scream
Inn was one of the strips that found its way into the new paper with
the clumsy title of Whoopee! and Shiver
& Shake.

The first guest appearance in Scream
Inn can be found soon after the merger, in the issue cover-dated 26
October 1974 (No. 34), and it was quite an unusual one indeed. That week’s guest
looked a lot like I Spy from SPARKY comic published by DCT. I believe this is one of very
few examples in British comics when a character appeared in a rival
publication produced by the competitor. Brian Walker illustrated I Spy starting from SPARKY
issue No. 300 (17 October 1970), so the inclusion of a look-alike into the episode of Scream Inn in Whoopee! and Shiver
& Shake (published by IPC) must have been a cheeky experiment on
his part. Here is the episode, followed by the three-page set of I Spy from SPARKY, the
first one by Brian Walker.

While we are on the subject of SPARKY’s I Spy
and cheeky sneak-ins by Brian Walker, who is that bespectacled bloke in the top
right corner of this panel of Scream Inn from Shiver and Shake issue 51 (February 23rd, 1974)?